I write code. I’ll defer to people who were trained in military tactics and global diplomacy to decide how many apples and how many oranges we need.
Then I’ll write the code to make the apples and oranges work, assuming they aren’t chemically lethal apples or nuclear oranges.
We agree on that %100. Everyone is so obsessed with 45 that they forget W is the one that got us into this mess.
President Collidge once joked that the airforce only needed one plane and the aviators could take turns training in it. This later led to the term “Calvin Coolidge’s revenge” when it was noted how airplanes got more and more expensive and that sooner or later the airforce would only be able to afford one of them. Supposedly this will happen 2116 if you extrapolate.
If you extrapolate current climate predictions, we won’t need an airforce in 2116. All we’ll need is the navy.
beautiful warbird, but the Grumman Hellcat did all the heavy lifting in the pacific and remains my favorite Navy fighter.
Ironically, sometimes the people closest to and most familiar with the problem are actually blind to the solutions they are looking for and need, say, an outside statistician like Abraham Wald to help them out.
While I agree with the concept, failure vs. success is too binary for me.
My spouse and I are reasonably happy and my two kids are still alive and seem to be learning stuff. I’m gonna chalk that up as a success, although others might see my situation as a failure since I don’t own a yacht yet.
Whistling Death
And probably destroy the rest with the first supersonic pass.
“In order to keep the Corsair as aerodynamically clean as possible, designers made sure there was nothing protruding into the surrounding air to produce additional drag. In addition to the innovative “bent-wing” design, the intake for the aircraft’s turbo-supercharger, intercooler and oil cooler were located in slots in the inboard leading edges of the wings. Air running through those slots at high speeds gave the aircraft a very distinctive sound, and the Japanese tagged the fighter with the moniker, ‘Whistling Death.’” ~ FighterSweep.com
The bent wings was an interesting design choice. The aircraft needed a large prop, which would necessitate a longer undercarriage. But this would make the undercarraige flimsy for carrier landings and difficult to retract. So they kept the robust landing gear, and just bent the wings downward near the wing root to allow the wheels to reach the ground (the carrier deck).
How expensive are the armaments in a modern fighter jet?
Quite, in my understanding.
The 20mm cannon shells that they’d shoot these down with? Considerably less than it’d cost to train a pilot to get one of these up in the air.
Wait - was that a reply to me? I don’t think I said those words…
When I was a kid, we all used to hang out along the Canarsie “beach”. (Note the quotation marks. 
) Not far off was Floyd Bennett Field (still there), and the F-4 naval reserve pilots stationed there sometimes playfully buzzed us with extreme, low-altitude runs, rewarding the crowd (at least me) with their turbine engine whines. You can hear an example of that at 0:37 below.
My “uncle” flew F-4s for the Vermont National Guard - The Green Mountain Boys. But for some reason I’ve never been a big fan of the F-4, though it is a work horse.
Along with what others have said, it is demoralizing to tell the pilots: “We’ve decided that it is cheaper to get a bunch of you killed than to purchase more expensive planes.”
